North America’s largest bitcoin mining firm will soon trade publicly on Canada’s premier stock exchange.On October 9, 2019, Hut 8 will officially begin trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Before graduating to the largest stock exchange in Canada, Hut 8 was listed on the Canadian Venture Exchange, a smaller public exchange for emerging businesses which operates under the same umbrella as the TSX.“The TSX is the fourth-largest exchange in North America and one of the largest in the world. Being listed on the TSX will broaden the investor audience for Hut 8 and the hope is that will lead to more investor interest and liquidity for the shares,” Hut 8 CEO Andrew Kiguel told Bitcoin Magazine.TSX Sandbox Leads to Bitcoin Listing This listing comes as part of TSX’s sandbox program which permits unconventional companies to earn a seat at the world’s ninth-largest stock exchange without having to endure all of the usual registration requirements. A company that specializes in bitcoin mining is about as unconventional as it gets, and by the same token, Hut 8 is the first Bitcoin-focused company to hit the exchange.“The TSX Sandbox program was created to help companies that don’t fit traditional listing criteria, but merit a listing on the senior exchange based on other criteria,” Kiguel said. “Hut 8 already met most of the listing requirements, yet as part of a new industry, we did not meet a few of the traditional requirements. The Sandbox program enabled us to work with the TSX to establish criteria under which we could get listed.”The company’s ticker will remain the same (conveniently, HUT). In addition to the TSX, Hut 8 also trades on the New York-based, OTC securities trading desk OTC Markets Group as HUTMF.A Bitcoin Mining Comeback KidHut 8 was established as part of “an exclusive partnership with the Bitfury Group,” the Dutch bitcoin mining and technology company. According to Hut 8’s website, it has mined over 10,000 bitcoin to date across 94 mining centers operating in Alberta, Canada. Tapping into a variety of renewable energies, these data centers can produce 963 petahashes per second and consume 109.4 megawatts of energy. As of this writing, Hut 8’s stock price is trading for $1.52 with 90.3 million shares outstanding. The stock leapt to an all-time high on the Toronto Venture Exchange in March 2018 at $4.70 a share, but then the market bottomed out at the end of the year — ushering in a particularly brutal business climate for mining companies. And Hut 8 was no exception as its valuation backslid with the market, falling to $0.81 in March 2019, almost a year to the day since it hit its all-time high. This dive, which wiped Hut 8’s stock by more than three-quarters of its valuation, took half of the company’s workforce with it as Hut 8 moved to restructure.With this new listing, however, Hut 8 will look toward future growth as its stock rebounds alongside its revenue flow (the second quarter of 2019, for example, Hut 8 in revenue for the company). Kiguel told Bitcoin Magazine that, in a bid to increase shareholder value, Hut 8 plans to increase its mining capacity, seek out more efficient and cheaper electricity sources and “[h]old a significant inventory of bitcoin for appreciation.”
